0

It’s Alcatel-Lucent‘s second acquisition in 3 months and without a doubt, the company is trying to flex a little muscle in the mobile applications space. The company bought ProgrammableWeb, a well-known respository for web API’s back in June and has just announced the acquisition of OpenPlug for cross-platform mobile app development.

With the acquisition of France-based OpenPlug, Alcatel-Lucent will provide tools enabling developers to develop and easily deploy mobile apps across multiple platforms. OpenPlug’s solutions allow developers to write apps once and then convert them into native software, compatible with various mobile operating systems – including iOs, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and Linux.

Apparently, OpenPlug’s software can reduce go to market time by as much as 80 percent, according to a statement made in the press release by Alcatel-Lucent’s VP of global developer strategy, Laura Merling. Applications previously only available on sophisticated smartphones will now be available on any mobile device. In addition, the technology can be extended to other areas of application development: IPTV, game consoles, etc.

As with ProgrammableWeb, the terms of the transaction have not yet been disclosed.

Alcatel is a great play. At 2,10€, it is a bargain to play both the mobile growth and the need for telcos to buy new systems (hardware and compression software) to face traffic exponential growth of video and Cloud related datas.
The new CEO seems to restructure well the geographical structures that were creating higher costs than the competition

[…] with Alcatel-Lucent’s acquisition of OpenPlug, we at least see the beginnings of a pervasive strategy (did anyone else notice their “all […]

Henri Copti

Congrats to Openplug! So here we go, next in line of deployment-easing technologies would typically be Phonegap, Appcelerator, Mosync or possibly Ideaworks. Interesting, yet not suprising, once again it is a hardware and systems manufacturer doing the buying — similar to when Finnish Nokia aquired Scandinavian multi-platform company Troll tech a while back — and not the telephony operators, even as it is they who benefit from offering applications across many different handys and strengthening their role in the chain of value for mobile.